Ralph Carr: Defence barrister claims guilty rape verdict ‘obvious’ miscarriage of justice

Celebrity agent Ralph Carr’s convictions for raping a woman are an “obvious” miscarriage of justice, his lawyer has told a court.

The 66-year-old, full name Ralph Carnovale-Carr, was found guilty of sexually assaulting and twice raping a woman in her 20s following a jury trial last month in the County Court of Victoria.

During the trial, jurors heard Carr met the woman, who he’d known previously, in early 2023 to discuss work opportunities at his company Ralph Carr Management and sexually assaulted her in his home after a night spent drinking and using cocaine.

The high-profile sports and entertainment manager returned to court this week as his legal team argued his sentence should be stayed, or put on hold, pending an appeal against the verdict.

Defence barrister Dermot Dann KC argued anyone who heard the victim’s evidence “should be very concerned, very, very uncomfortable about the guilty verdicts”.

He told the court in 35 years as a trial barrister this was the first time he’d applied for a stay of sentence for the charge.

“This is the most obvious miscarriage of justice I’ve ever seen in all that time,” he said.

“We make no apologies for bringing the application, we make no apologies for appealing the verdicts.

“We have a man who maintains his innocence... a man who is going through hell in prison.”

In response, Judge Frank Gucciardo said he was not sure it was appropriate for Mr Dann to express the personal opinion and may be “overstating your position”.

Prosecutor Matthew Fisher, for the Crown, later addressed Mr Dann’s submission, saying: “we are very concerned on this side of the bar table”.

“We hope he hasn’t made those statements to Your Honour to garner or attract some sort of media attention,” he said.

Addressing the stay application, Mr Dann took the court to a series of features throughout the trial he argued could lead the Court of Appeal to consider the verdicts “unsafe or unsatisfactory”.

These includes differences in the woman’s varying accounts of what happened, unchallenged differences in her evidence to other witnesses and other objective evidence he said the prosecution had failed to address.